


eyes like broken christmas lights

by catsilhouette



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Pining, lots of introspection, only a little bit, this is why lardo's art friends think she's angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 09:32:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6149148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catsilhouette/pseuds/catsilhouette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop before realizing that he’s pretty much always barefoot, that his name might be Shitty but he was anything but.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eyes like broken christmas lights

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Panic! At the Disco's Victorious.

There was that one diagram she remembered from her science textbook in eighth grade – the brain, with all the different regions highlighted in different, bright colors, with descriptions and functions labeled on the side. That felt like an accurate depiction of her brain – organized, color-coded, but with lots of sparkly 3D stickers of baby animals. And then there was this huge part – a green, overgrown part that smelled like aftershave and old books, and it was a new part – maybe, like, three years old, and she’d done all sorts of random, unthinkable stuff her eighth-grade self would have _cried_ at because of this particular part of her brain.

 

Because when it came to Shitty, she had no _clue_ what her decisions entailed. Logically, every muscle in her body told her _no_ because a) he was an athlete b) he kind of looked like a gross trucker who wore caps that advertised mustache rides c) literally partied his clothes off and d) so much weed oh my god.

 

On her first day as manager of this circus, he’d come to the coaches’ office in a towel and politely and rather shyly asked her to take his first name off the roster, and she – boy, she’d been so confused, mainly because she’d never seen a guy shirtless like _that_ before, and really, she was having trouble pulling her eyes away. And he, well, he seemed to be stuck in his own loop of embarrassment, rubbing at his reddening neck and making leftover drops of water fall from his hair to his chest, scattering across his collarbones as he stuttered through an explanation.

 

Honestly, she didn’t hear any of what followed, and at some point, she got overwhelmingly irritated at herself for letting this dude ramble on and on and _on_ and she bent down and scribbled something on her clipboard. When she looked back up, his eyes – _green_ – were huge and…well, really kind of nice-looking.

 

“Your secret’s safe with me, largely because I don’t care and will most likely forget,”

 

She sounded a lot more confident than she felt.

 

His face went sort of blank, and then those green eyes were crinkling at the edges and he was pointing finger guns at her. “Sweet! See ya later!” And she couldn’t help but laugh when he walked out backwards, holstering the guns as he turned around and scuttled away.

 

Of course, it was weird that he asked her to change it when there _was_ no first name for him anyway, just “B. Knight” and it was strange that he didn’t know that, or ask one of the coaches, and it was especially strange to see him outside of class because they were friends but not _friends_ , and she concluded that he was just very weird.

 

It only got weirder after that. She actually began to… _like_ him.

 

She remembered feeling his hands on her shoulders, how he was yelling at Ransom and Holster because “you motherfuckers better be TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY this is a RITE of PASSAGE this shit is FUCKING _SACRED!_ ”, how the long tangle of her hair had caught in the blindfold and how he’d gently tugged it out, whispering slight apologies. She remembered thinking once more how _strange_ this boy was, and how she felt herself smile when he started to yell again (because maybe she’d peeked and maybe he was wearing his hockey pants and maybe they were falling off and maybe he looked completely ridiculous holding them up with one hand).

 

So maybe he was a little weird and maybe she was a little weird, and maybe they weren’t meant to be. She left it at that and kneeled at center ice with the rest of the freshmen and helped clean up afterward, stumbling as she bent down to stack the pylons and hand them off to Shitty, ignoring the way his hands felt when they brushed against hers.

 

 

And then all of a sudden, she was smoking weed on the roof and killing it at beer pong with him. She expected things to change when she slept over – literally just _slept_ , curled up against the wall, shirt riding up, toes against Shitty’s impossibly warm calves – but they didn’t, not even a little bit.

She wasn’t special.

 

And she didn’t expect to feel special. It took her a long while to settle into who she was – this person who owned six different types of eyeliner, who spent most of her evenings and weekends in a house that was filled to the rooftops with loud boys, who made enormous paintings twice her size, who could probably down a six pack all on her own (not that she’d tried - not that she didn’t _want_ to try), but she’d never imagined college would be like this, and she’d always felt a little awkward in her own skin. To be able to do all this – well, that was special enough.

 

(She was totally going to tell her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren about that one time she beat an NHL star at beer pong.)

 

Her imagination only stretched so far and so wide – granted, she _was_ an artist, and yes, whether it was finding new ways to rip jeans or incorporate a tangle of half-broken christmas lights into her newest installation or set the boys’ room assignments so everyone was happy, she was always finding new and creative ways to figure things out – but _this_ was something she had sort-of-maybe-considered but was definitely-definitely- _not_ -thinking-about, not when she called Shitty up at 4 am on the verge of tears and he ended up helping her glue crystal stars all over black felt for hours, not when he blew a kiss suspiciously close to where she’d been standing in the box after he scored a (perfectly impossible, absolutely gorgeous) goal, and definitely not when he sat so close to her that she could feel the heat bleed through her newly ripped jeans, thigh against thigh, feet knocking gently against each other. She was constantly amazed at how a _guy_ could make her feel like this, kind of floaty and really, really _genuinely_ happy – she didn’t care whether she was playing flip cup or sitting on the roof with his head in her lap, and it seemed like he didn’t either – it always left her with that gentle-happy feeling that made her feel tiny spikes of delight all at once – like getting winged eyeliner right on the first try, like finishing a painting and stepping back and actually _liking_ what she saw, like painting her toenails in bright, completely different colors, but it was all culminated into one giant, shining golden ball of warm and happy feelings that settled in her chest and spun slowly, radiating excitement, fizzling at the ends like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

 

There was nothing neat about her life – organized, yes, certainly, but things were always a mess. There was a method to her madness, a string of desire tying everything together with a tight knot. And somehow, he _fit_ into that mess, he fit really well. He got the importance of late night artistic revelations, he understood true inspiration, and most importantly – he _showed_ her he understood. She wasn’t about words – she wasn’t an English major. Words failed her most of the time, they didn’t capture the essence of life the way she knew it, and he got that too, somehow, miraculously. Who else could she count on in the middle of the night, when nothing seemed to be going the way it should?

 

 

She’d cut his hair the week before and she’d been crying every day since, not because his hair was gone, but because he soon would be, and he found her doing just that on the roof. It was a month after he’d given her dibs, and honestly – god, that just made her cry _more_ because now she was thinking of being surrounded by his things without actually being with him (because they both knew he wasn’t going to clean out his room fully, and if he tried, Lardo would steal back two boxes for every one he tried to pack away because he was coming back, dammit).  

 

He was her best friend. She didn’t just love him a fuckton, she also really liked him. She liked how he didn’t let her go through anything alone, no matter how much she pulled away – how he always came through for her, right at the moment when she was going to throw her clipboard across the room, right when something inside her was going to tip over and explode, he was patching things up, in his own strange, naked way. He didn’t protest when she climbed up next to him on the roof that one week during her freshman year. She remembered him clearing away the snow for her, and she remembered sighing loudly and stealing his joint, pretending not to hear his shocked laugh. She remembered how his cheeks had pinkened when she’d looked at him and shrugged.

 

_He started noticing small things after that – how his floral snapback would periodically disappear, how suddenly, miraculously, all the copies of all the rosters had ‘B. Knight’ on them, how Haus parties seemed slightly and suddenly more organized, and how she’d smiled when he dragged up not one but two lawn chairs up to the roof._

 

There was no way he didn’t know. Just no way.

 

But it was going to be okay, right? They were going to be okay? This was a long time coming, and what she wanted to say was an even _longer_ time coming, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. And he was going to go to Harvard and come back once-in-a-blue-moon-style, and she was going to do her senior thesis on something really far out and abstract, and she’d Skype him about it and he’d come see it, and maybe he’d drive down to surprise her before that, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe they’d see each other at home over break sometime, maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe their lives were meant to be criss-crossing – parallel at times, intersecting at times, and maybe they weren’t.

 

Just as long as he didn’t ask for his jersey back, she was going to be okay.

 


End file.
